SHIPPENSBURG - John Loewen spent much of World War II in the bottom of a "tin can."

Loewen is proud of having served in the engine rooms of three destroyers in the Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea and Pacific Ocean and aboard a fourth destroyer at the start of the Korean War.

"I didn't want to go on another ship," Loewen said. "You wore dungarees. You were the Dungaree Navy."

Loewen, 87, had an aversion to dressing up for the admiral's inspections. Wearing a T-shirt in the kitchen of his Shippensburg home, he recently took a break from baking Christmas cookies to speak with a reporter.

He served aboard ships that hunted submarines, navigated mine fields and evaded disaster.

"We knew we might not make it," Loewen said. "We did our job. We did what we were assigned to do. When you signed up, you knew if you lost a leg that was part of the job. We were not only fighting for our lives, but fighting for everyone in that action. That's the way the service is."

Loewen's primary duty was in the engine room, but he was on deck when a guided bomb struck a landing craft off North Africa. The scarred survivors of the atomic blast at Nagasaki touched him.

He joined the shore patrol as often as he could to get his feet on dry land. He didn't like some of the things he had to do. Some things he won't talk about.

Raised in Mount Joy, Loewen was 14 years old when he enrolled in the Thaddeus Stevens Trade School at Lancaster. He turned 17 on Nov. 1, 1942, and on Thanksgiving Day he enlisted.

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"I heard people talk about the glorification of beating the Germans and Japanese," he said. "I didn't want to be in school when that happened. I was bamboozled by propaganda."

Called up on Jan. 7, 1943, Loewen had eight weeks of basic training at Sampson, N.Y., before manning the coal-fired boilers in a hotel at Montauk on Long Island. Sailors who tested torpedoes roomed in the government-reconditioned hotel. Loewen never went out on the launch barge, but he learned that the Navy had trouble with its early torpedoes.

"A lot of things could go wrong, and they did," Loewen said. "As soon as they were fired, they'd go all over the place. Some sank."

To the Mediterranean

Six weeks later he was assigned to the water pumps in the engine room of the USS Haines. The destroyer escort chased its way through submarines in the Atlantic to the Mediterranean Sea.

"We found some subs, and we got some," he said.

The Mediterranean was a more dangerous place - with E-boats, the German version of a PT boat, added to the U-boat threat, he said. The Haines escorted oil tankers along North Africa. Returning from one mission, the Haines rounded a bend near Tunis.

"A German Messerschmitt flew over top of us," Loewen said. "He didn't fire at us. We didn't fire at him, either. I guess he was too high. He was a scout."

The German propagandist Lord Haha reported the next day that a lone destroyer going around a bend had been blown up.

"That was the first time I was sunk, but I kept going," Loewen said.

The crew was amazed to see all kinds of ships assembling in Tunis for what would be the invasion of southern France, he said.

"Our assignment was to patrol the edge and keep subs and E-boats out," he said.

Loewen was assigned to the repair party one day and was on deck watching for subs and periscopes.

"My job was to repair the ship if it got hit, so it wouldn't sink," he said. "As the day was coming to an end, we saw a guided bomb coming toward us. We thought it was a plane, but it wasn't. We thought it was coming for us."

It flew over the ship and hit a tank landing ship (LST).

"All I saw was a big flash," he said. "When it died down, there was no LST. Nobody around. Nothing floating. That put distress in everybody."

The LST was among 26 lost to enemy action during the war. The LST could carry more than 200 men with a couple of landing craft or several tanks and vehicles.

Later, German bombers flew over the Haines and the port of Oran to hit the British airport inland, Loewen said. It was to be the last bombing of Oran during the war.

The destroyer made its way through a mine field between Malta and Alexandria, Egypt. Loewen glanced over the side to see mines bobbing in the water. His crewmen asked to sleep on deck, and the captain acquiesced. Loewen went below to his bunk.

"If I'm going to die in this war, I want to die in my bed," he told his mates.

The ship had run through its stores of meat, and in Alexandria the British offered some of their spare meat.

"We saw this barge at the far end of the bay," Loewen said. "We could smell it all the way in. What it was was mutton. Killed, packaged and frozen in 1935. We ate it. I'm still here."

Loewen was about to take a bus tour of the city when German bombers flew over on their way to bomb the airport. He and his mates never went to the bomb shelter and returned to the ship as quickly as they could.

Again Lord Haha reported that German planes had destroyed all of the ships in the harbor.

About a month later the Haines left Oran.

"All the ships headed out," Loewen said. "We didn't know where we were going. Nobody did. In two days we were in southern France. At 5 a.m. guns were firing everywhere."

The successful invasion on Aug. 15, 1944, came two months after the Normandy invasion in the north of France.

The Haines then helped transport the 8th Air Force from Sardinia to Italy.

"We were going through a floating mine field," he said. "The guns were going all the time, blowing up the mines. We had a good crew of shooters. We all got through."

Loewen said he did not recall where the Haines was on V-E Day, but "when Germany surrendered I think we drank all the whiskey, rum and wine that we could get our hands on."

The Haines returned to the states as part of a convoy sailing at 3 knots an hour from Africa to Florida and up the East Coast.

"That was the slowest escort job I ever had," Loewen said.

There were hazards. Rogue U-boats did not recognize Germany's surrender. A storm claimed a small ship, the only loss on the crossing.

To the Pacific

The Haines was scheduled to be converted to a destroyer that would transport troops. Her crew was reassigned in Brooklyn, N.Y. Loewen became a "plank owner," a member of the first crew of the USS Hugh Purvis. The destroyer was much improved over the Haines. Its three double-barrel 5-inch guns were mounted in turrets. Loewen went on the shakedown training.

"It was a good ship," Loewen said. "I loved it. We got orders to go through the Ditch, the Panama Canal, and go to Pearl Harbor."

The crew spent several weeks in Pearl Harbor, then were assigned to other destroyers.

"They cheated us," he said.

Loewen got the USS Raby, a destroyer older than the Haines. The Raby steamed to waters off Okinawa after the invasion in the summer of 1945.

The Raby conducted sea rescue operations. Once the ship searched for a civilian plane. The pilot had wanted to be the first American to fly around the world in a twin-engine Cessna. He flew from San Francisco nearly to Hong Kong.

"The only thing we found on the third day was a wheel," Loewen said. "We never found him or the plane."

The Raby rescued an Air Force crew after their bomber lost an engine. The airmen's lifeboats were left in the sea.

Raby's crew also was called on to destroy an errant floating dock. They opened up their guns and even tried dropping a depth charge close in from a life boat.

"So far as I know, it's still floating," he said.

The Raby ferried the remains of allied pilots and military personnel from Formosa to Shanghai. The first load of 125 containers ranged in size from a shoe box to a coffin, according to Loewen. The Raby arrived in Shanghai after 3 p.m. and the Army refused to take the shipment, but the Marines brought a barge and took the cargo to a building where they slept on the roof.

"Around 2 a.m. we thought World War II had started all over again," Loewen said. "The next morning we saw bodies all over the barge."

The Marines had shot Chinese pirates, he said. The Raby made two more deliveries - one of 100 caskets and another of 65.

In 1946 in the north China port of Tsingtao, trucks loaded with dead bodies rolled down the streets almost hourly, he said. The watch had their orders - "If you see anything move, shoot it. We'll take care of it in the morning."

"We never had to shoot," Loewen said.

Fortunes

Loewen recalled that only one man was seriously injured aboard the three destroyers. The sailor lost both this legs when they were pinched in a turret as the guns were raised.

Once, Loewen was thrown back inside as he stepped through a hatch to the deck. The shock wave from a round knocked him against the wall as it shot past the ship.

"We were fortunate," he said.

Sailors kept each other informed about what was going as events unfolded.

Sometimes the tales could only be told later.

Loewen was manning the engine room throttle in the South China Sea, and the ship suddenly leaned way over. The dial read full speed.

"I do what that dial tells me to do," Loewen said.

The officer of the day had spotted a Japanese mine go under the bow, Loewen said. He jumped about 10 feet from his watch to the deck and knocked the helmsman from the wheel. He spun the wheel.

"Everybody was sure if it had hit us, we'd be gone," Loewen said. "If it hit us, the way it was going it would have hit our engine room. That's where I was. We were happy with him. He couldn't do any wrong for a long time."

Occupied Japan

Loewen toured Nagasaki while the ship was ported at Sesebo, Japan. A mountain separated the residential part of the city from the industrial. There was nothing in the industrial section except a large round chimney with a memorial marker in English and Japanese and a sign to "keep out." One of the crew who wanted to go inside kicked the chimney. The brick crumbled .

"The people I'll never forget," he said. "They were scarred. The design of your shirt, it would be printed on your skin. They had permanent tattoos."

He was also on a train that stopped in Hiroshima, location of a new train station and little else. Japanese passengers were afraid. The conductor told Loewen they were saying, "We want to go. We want to go."

The crew also visited a small island off the coast of Japan where the weapons of surrendered Japanese officers were stored.

"They gave each one of us two of the swords," said Loewen, who also was given a .25 caliber rifle.

"When I got to Pearl Harbor, they took them away," he said. "We needed a Frontier Pass (to pickup the items). Nobody told us. They sent them to me eight years later."

He had signed up for four years in the Navy, and after four years and a month Loewen pointed out that he should have been discharged. The Navy arranged for his flight to Pearl Harbor, but an ensign bumped him. Two days later he boarded a ship that had not sunk during atomic bomb testing at the Bikini Atoll. The ship had been at the outer rim of the fleet. Some of its hatches were labeled "Don't go into this place," but the ship limped to Hawaii in a week on a single engine.

The Navy encouraged him to keep his rank by joining the Navy Reserves: "We know there's going to be another war." Loewen said he fell for the propaganda and signed up for the reserves.

He went home, married Lois and they had two children. He worked as a checker at the front door the A&P Tea Co. in East Hampton on Long Island, N.Y.

Korea

At the outbreak of the Korean War, Loewen was called to Charleston, S.C.

The World-War-II vintage USS Porter was recommissioned in 1951, worn boilers and all. One of them blew during trials. Loewen helped re-rig the destroyer and ready her for battle.

Loewen said he was happy in the engine room of a destroyer.

"If you want to lose weight that's a good place to do it," he said. "It was 110 to 120 degrees under normal conditions because of the steam."

The threat of atomic war upped the ante. Off the shore of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the crew sealed the ship during an exercise, and the engine room temperature rose to 140 in no time, he said.

"Within a minute or two, it was so hot some of the guys passed out," Loewen said. "Those of us who didn't, we had to take care of their job as well as our own."

After several months the Porter was ready, but Loewen was put on the beach with just three weeks left in his activation.

The Porter is credited with destroying a North Korean train and damaging two others. Loewen said the ship participated in the invasion at Inchon.

"I wish I'd been with them, but I had a wife and three kids," Loewen said. "I asked during Vietnam. They said: 'How old are you? Nope, can't take you. You're too old.'"

He left military life with a different outlook.

"I had a feeling God was calling me to the ministry after the Korean War because of the way things were happening to me," he said.

After several years of teaching Sunday School, he gave his first sermon and sweated like he was back in the engine room. He later graduated from Messiah College and was pastor at several local churches. He retired in 1991.

"I'm still preaching," he said. "I promised God I would do it as long as I could."